Update Opportunity Contact Information

Here is a useful tip for companies using Salesforce PRM and assign leads and opportunities to their partners. Because partners cannot see contact records in the PRM Portal we need to make sure that the relevant contact information is put on the opportunity record so that partners know who to contact regarding the opportunity.

Will Moxley from Salesforce posted an excellent blog last year on how to do this using an scontrol after the lead is converted. The downside of this is user must remember to press the scontrol link after they convert the opportunity.

 
This approach automatically copies the contact information to a converted opportunity using standard product features, no scontrols, and makes creative use of the Winter 07 field update feature. While the setup does require a few steps the payback is in making sure your partners have the information they needs.

 

The high level sequence of events is:

• Create/ Save a Lead
• A workflow rule then invokes field updates to copy the standard field values to custom fields
• Standard lead conversion maps the custom lead fields to the custom opportunity fields

 

Examples & Instruction

The following goes through an example of how to implement this approach, with the subsequent table illustrating the standard lead fields and corresponding custom lead and opportunity fields in this example. (Note: Apprivo has posted the custom field to a private AppExchange package so you don't have to create the custom fields manually)

1. Create custom lead fields for each of the field you want on the opportunity
2. Create custom opportunity fields for each corresponding custom lead field created
3. Map the lead fields to the opportunity fields through standard lead field mapping
4. Create a field update for each of the custom lead fields
5. Create a lead workflow rule which calls the field updates each time a lead is created or edited

 

Standard Lead Field	Custom Lead Field	Custom Opportunity Field
First Name (Text 40)
Last Name (Text 80)	Contact Name (Text 120)	Contact Name (Text 120)
Title (Text 80)	Contact Title (Text   80)	Contact Title (Text   80)
Company (Text 80)	Contact Company (Text 80)	Contact Company (Text 80)
Email (Email)	Contact Email (Email)	Contact Email (Email)
Phone (Phone)	Contact Phone (Phone)	Contact Phone (Phone)
City (Text 40)	Contact City (Text 40)	Contact City (Text 40)
State Province (Text 40)	Contact State Province (Text 40)	Contact State Province (Text 40)
Postal Code (Text 20)	Contact Postal Code (Text 20)	Contact Postal Code (Text 20)
Country (Text 40)	Contact Country (Text 40)	Contact Country (Text 40)

 

Create custom lead fields for each of the field you want on the opportunity

• Create the lead fields matching the standard field types specified in table above
• Apprivo recommends that you create a Contact Name field (Text 120) instead of separate First Name and Last Name field. This is both for usability and minimizing the number of custom fields needed. The field length needs to be 120 to hold the maximum length of the first and last name fields
• There is no particular reason to put any of these fields on layouts since the field values are already present in other fields and are only use for mapping to the opportunity

 

Create custom opportunity fields for each corresponding custom lead field created

• Apprivo recommends that you have a different page layout for partners and your internal users, since the latter does not need to see the custom contact fields on the opportunity layout since they can view the contact role related list for this information. Create a Contact Information section on the partner opportunity layout
• Create the corresponding opportunity custom fields
• It is your discretion to decide if the partner can change the contact information on the opportunity. Apprivo recommends that at a minimum the email and phone information be editable since the initial captured information may need to be updated
• Add the fields to the partner opportunity layout and once all of the fields are created edit the layout placing the fields in a Contact Information section
• The following is an example of the contact section in the PRM Portal

 

Map the lead fields to the opportunity fields through standard lead field mapping

• Use standard Lead Custom Field Mapping to map the fields created in the previous two steps

 

 Create a field update for each of the custom lead fields

• Field updates are one of many powerful Winter 07 features, and are the secret sauce in this implementation! They allow you to specify a field to be updated to a specific value based on a standard (or approval) workflow rule
• The field updates page can be accessed from Setup | Customize | Workflow & Approvals | Field Updates
• In this scenario we will create 9 field updates, or one for each custom lead field we created earlier
• The following are two examples show how to create the contact name and contact title update rules. The contact name concatenates the lead first and last name (with a space in between) while the contact title simply gets updated to the lead title field. Repeat the title example for each of the remaining lead fields

• Once all of the update fields are created we need to create a workflow rule to trigger the field updates

 

 

Create a lead workflow rule to call the field updates

• Create a lead workflow rule similar to the following. Enter criteria as needed to limit the workflow rule to conditions that require the custom fields to be populated
• Once the workflow rule runs, the custom fields will be updated appropriately and the fields mapped to the opportunity upon lead conversion